Light bulbs frame the surface of a box painted in baby blue. Less footlights and more a memory of votives in the ancient church behind Sacre Coeur. An alter dedicated to those gone missing. As all alters are. Elsewhere in the corner a tall string of the same light bulbs repurposed to draw your attention upward to the band of stenciled text that crests the gallery’s three walls. A timeline, like a prayer. I read it, left to right, and remember following the stations of the cross, 14 in total, while walking the periphery of a church in Pennsylvania. Before this installation at the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, I had never caught the allusion. FGT had reworked the exhibition space as a chapel. ... Enter Thibault in silver shorts and earbuds, an iPhone in hand. Without acknowledging us he steps onto the platform and immediately starts dancing. A huffing, puffing breathing machine. Thibault understood and manifested the mixed messages of this performance. A live dancing body, immanent and incarnate, worked into the allegory of a space to signify more keenly the specter of death and loss, of illness and immobility, of disappearance and vanishing, than anything that might have to do with vitality, presence, strength, or the other common metaphors that dance is often made to deploy. Grinding hips, feet stomping the battered platform, heels digging in, jaws clenched, hands pumping the air, and eyes only ever furtively glancing back toward any of us — this is living in a full state of rage, in the pleasure of that heat, in the total absorption of exaltation. The go-go becomes our saint, if not also a martyr, shaking his fist in a fit of sexual defiance, against the punishment of death, while at the same time, piercing any false hope we may harbor about our own immortality. We know without a doubt that this dancer will vanish; he is already in the blue of incandescent bulbs and white walls something of a hologram. When he goes there will be no catharsis, no warning. We will have to stiffen our spines and accept the ambiguity of our own living, its pleasure always haunted by the specter of its disappearance. ~r